regex to capture pattern with non-fixed length lookbehind - split string - r

I'd like to split the string into the following
S <- "No. Ok (whatever). If you must. Please try to be careful (shakes head)."
[1] No.
[2] Ok (whatever). If you must.
[3] Please try to be careful (shakes head).
The pattern is the first . before each (...).
I'm familiar with (?<=...) (i.e. positive lookbehind) but this doesn't seem to work with non-fixed length patterns. I'd like to know if I'm wrong about positive lookbehind or if there's some regex magic to do this. Thanks!

Note that I don't know much about ruby, but there should be something like a split method that uses a regex pattern as a delimiter and split the string accordingly.
Use this regex:
(?<=\.) (?=[^.]+?\(.+?\))
This looks for a space character. Behind the space, there must be a dot (?<=\.). After it (?=, there must be a bunch of characters that are not dots [^.]+?, and then a pair of brackets with something inside \(.+?\).
Try it online: https://regex101.com/r/8PcbFJ/1

Related

Extract up to two more digits

This may be a very simple question but I have not much experience with regex expressions. This page is a good source of regex expressions but could not figure out how to include them into my following code:
data %>% filter(grepl("^A01H1", icl))
Question
I would like to extract the values in one column of my data frame starting with this A01H1 up to 2 more digits, for example A01H100, A01H140, A01H110. I could not find a solution despite my few attempts:
Attempts
I looked at this question from which I used ^A01H1[0-9].{2} to select up tot two more digits.
I tried with adding any character ^A01H1[0-9][0-9][x-y] to stop after two digits.
Any help would be much appreciated :)
You can use "^A01H1\\d{1,2}$".
The first part ("^A01H1"), you figured out yourself, so what are we doing in the second part ("\\d{1,2}$")?
\d includes all digits and is equivalent to [0-9], since we are working in R you need to escape \ and thus we use \\d
{1,2} indicates we want to have 1 or 2 matches of \\d
$ specifies the end of the string, so nothing should come afterwards and this prevents to match more than 2 digits
It looks as if you want to match a part of a string that starts with A01H1, then contains 1 or 2 digits and then is not followed with any digit.
You may use
^A01H1\d{1,2}(?!\d)
See the regex demo. If there can be no text after two digits at all, replace (?!\d) with $.
Details
^ - start of strinmg
A01H1 - literal string
\d{1,2} - one to two digits
(?!\d) - no digit allowed immediately to the right
$ - end of string
In R, you could use it like
grepl("^A01H1\\d{1,2}(?!\\d)", icl, perl=TRUE)
Or, with the string end anchor,
grepl("^A01H1\\d{1,2}$", icl)
Note the perl=TRUE is only necessary when using PCRE specific syntax like (?!\d), a negative lookahead.

REGEX pattern match in R for Course number

I need to identify matching course number that have xx.3xxxxxx.
These are some examples of the course numbers.
26.3730004
27.0210000
26.3730009
26.7114001
23.9610071
26.0A34430
23.3670005
26.0B05430
I tried many patterns one example I used is the pattern below. It did not get any match.
"[^0-9]{2}\Q.\E3[^0-9]+$"
I tried using grep and grepl. I actually need the code to return indexes.
This code shows my attempt to tag the rows that have matches.
Teacher$virtual[
which(
grepl("[^0-9]{2}\\Q.\\E3[^0-9]+$",Teacher$CourseNumber))]
<- "1"
I need to remove any row from my dataframe that have the course number with that pattern. XX.3XXXXXX
But, my code did not find any match. Can you please help me?
You should use
grepl("^[0-9]{2}\\.3", Teacher$CourseNumber)
See the regex graph:
Details:
^ - start of a string
[0-9]{2} - two digits
\\. - a dot (note that a regex escape is a literal backslash, but inside a string literal, "...", a single backslash is used to form string escape sequences, hence the backslash must be double to obtain a literal backslash char necessary for a regex escape)
3 - a 3 char.
NOTE: If you want to use in-pattern quoting with \Q and \E (in between which all chars are treated literally) you need to use PCRE regex, add perl=TRUE and use
grepl("^[0-9]{2}\\Q.\\E3", Teacher$CourseNumber, perl=TRUE)
Now, the dot is treated as a literal dot, not a . metacharacter that matches any char but a line break char (in a PCRE regex, . does not match line break chars by default).
Here, this simple expression would likely cover that:
^[0-9]{2}\.[3].+$
which has a [3] boundary right after the .. It would probably work without start and end anchors:
[0-9]{2}\.[3].+
Demo
We can add or reduce the boundaries, if it'd be necessary.

Double Colon in R Regular Expression

The goal is to remove all non-capital letter in a string and I managed to find a regular expression solution without fully understanding it.
> gsub("[^::A-Z::]","", "PendingApproved")
[1] "PA"
I tried to read the documentation of regex in R but the double colon isn't really covered there.
[]includes characters to match in regex, A-Z means upper case and ^ means not, can someone help me understand what are the double colons there?
As far as I know, you don't need those double colons:
gsub("[^A-Z]", "", "PendingApproved")
[1] "PA"
Your current pattern says to remove any character which is not A-Z or colon :. The fact that you repeat the colons twice, on each side of the character range, does not add any extra logic.
Perhaps the author of the code you are using confounded the double colons with R's regex own syntax for named character classes. For example, we could have written the above as:
gsub("[^[:upper:]]","", "PendingApproved")
where [:upper:] means all upper case letters.
Demo
To remove all small letters use following:
gsub("[a-z]","", "PendingApproved")
^ denotes only starting characters so
gsub("^[a-z]","", "PendingApproved")
will not remove any letters from your tested string because your string don't have any small letters in starting of it.
EDIT: As per Tim's comment adding negation's work in character class too here. So let's say we want to remove all digits in a given value among alphabets and digits then following may help.
gsub("[^[:alpha:]]","", "PendingApproved1213133")
Where it is telling gsub then DO NOT substitute alphabets in this process. ^ works as negation in character class.
We can use str_remove from stringr
library(stringr)
str_remove_all("PendingApproved", "[a-z]+")
#[1] "PA"

sub command to extract data and split data frame column [duplicate]

Simple regex question. I have a string on the following format:
this is a [sample] string with [some] special words. [another one]
What is the regular expression to extract the words within the square brackets, ie.
sample
some
another one
Note: In my use case, brackets cannot be nested.
You can use the following regex globally:
\[(.*?)\]
Explanation:
\[ : [ is a meta char and needs to be escaped if you want to match it literally.
(.*?) : match everything in a non-greedy way and capture it.
\] : ] is a meta char and needs to be escaped if you want to match it literally.
(?<=\[).+?(?=\])
Will capture content without brackets
(?<=\[) - positive lookbehind for [
.*? - non greedy match for the content
(?=\]) - positive lookahead for ]
EDIT: for nested brackets the below regex should work:
(\[(?:\[??[^\[]*?\]))
This should work out ok:
\[([^]]+)\]
Can brackets be nested?
If not: \[([^]]+)\] matches one item, including square brackets. Backreference \1 will contain the item to be match. If your regex flavor supports lookaround, use
(?<=\[)[^]]+(?=\])
This will only match the item inside brackets.
To match a substring between the first [ and last ], you may use
\[.*\] # Including open/close brackets
\[(.*)\] # Excluding open/close brackets (using a capturing group)
(?<=\[).*(?=\]) # Excluding open/close brackets (using lookarounds)
See a regex demo and a regex demo #2.
Use the following expressions to match strings between the closest square brackets:
Including the brackets:
\[[^][]*] - PCRE, Python re/regex, .NET, Golang, POSIX (grep, sed, bash)
\[[^\][]*] - ECMAScript (JavaScript, C++ std::regex, VBA RegExp)
\[[^\]\[]*] - Java, ICU regex
\[[^\]\[]*\] - Onigmo (Ruby, requires escaping of brackets everywhere)
Excluding the brackets:
(?<=\[)[^][]*(?=]) - PCRE, Python re/regex, .NET (C#, etc.), JGSoft Software
\[([^][]*)] - Bash, Golang - capture the contents between the square brackets with a pair of unescaped parentheses, also see below
\[([^\][]*)] - JavaScript, C++ std::regex, VBA RegExp
(?<=\[)[^\]\[]*(?=]) - Java regex, ICU (R stringr)
(?<=\[)[^\]\[]*(?=\]) - Onigmo (Ruby, requires escaping of brackets everywhere)
NOTE: * matches 0 or more characters, use + to match 1 or more to avoid empty string matches in the resulting list/array.
Whenever both lookaround support is available, the above solutions rely on them to exclude the leading/trailing open/close bracket. Otherwise, rely on capturing groups (links to most common solutions in some languages have been provided).
If you need to match nested parentheses, you may see the solutions in the Regular expression to match balanced parentheses thread and replace the round brackets with the square ones to get the necessary functionality. You should use capturing groups to access the contents with open/close bracket excluded:
\[((?:[^][]++|(?R))*)] - PHP PCRE
\[((?>[^][]+|(?<o>)\[|(?<-o>]))*)] - .NET demo
\[(?:[^\]\[]++|(\g<0>))*\] - Onigmo (Ruby) demo
If you do not want to include the brackets in the match, here's the regex: (?<=\[).*?(?=\])
Let's break it down
The . matches any character except for line terminators. The ?= is a positive lookahead. A positive lookahead finds a string when a certain string comes after it. The ?<= is a positive lookbehind. A positive lookbehind finds a string when a certain string precedes it. To quote this,
Look ahead positive (?=)
Find expression A where expression B follows:
A(?=B)
Look behind positive (?<=)
Find expression A where expression B
precedes:
(?<=B)A
The Alternative
If your regex engine does not support lookaheads and lookbehinds, then you can use the regex \[(.*?)\] to capture the innards of the brackets in a group and then you can manipulate the group as necessary.
How does this regex work?
The parentheses capture the characters in a group. The .*? gets all of the characters between the brackets (except for line terminators, unless you have the s flag enabled) in a way that is not greedy.
Just in case, you might have had unbalanced brackets, you can likely design some expression with recursion similar to,
\[(([^\]\[]+)|(?R))*+\]
which of course, it would relate to the language or RegEx engine that you might be using.
RegEx Demo 1
Other than that,
\[([^\]\[\r\n]*)\]
RegEx Demo 2
or,
(?<=\[)[^\]\[\r\n]*(?=\])
RegEx Demo 3
are good options to explore.
If you wish to simplify/modify/explore the expression, it's been explained on the top right panel of regex101.com. If you'd like, you can also watch in this link, how it would match against some sample inputs.
RegEx Circuit
jex.im visualizes regular expressions:
Test
const regex = /\[([^\]\[\r\n]*)\]/gm;
const str = `This is a [sample] string with [some] special words. [another one]
This is a [sample string with [some special words. [another one
This is a [sample[sample]] string with [[some][some]] special words. [[another one]]`;
let m;
while ((m = regex.exec(str)) !== null) {
// This is necessary to avoid infinite loops with zero-width matches
if (m.index === regex.lastIndex) {
regex.lastIndex++;
}
// The result can be accessed through the `m`-variable.
m.forEach((match, groupIndex) => {
console.log(`Found match, group ${groupIndex}: ${match}`);
});
}
Source
Regular expression to match balanced parentheses
(?<=\[).*?(?=\]) works good as per explanation given above. Here's a Python example:
import re
str = "Pagination.go('formPagination_bottom',2,'Page',true,'1',null,'2013')"
re.search('(?<=\[).*?(?=\])', str).group()
"'formPagination_bottom',2,'Page',true,'1',null,'2013'"
The #Tim Pietzcker's answer here
(?<=\[)[^]]+(?=\])
is almost the one I've been looking for. But there is one issue that some legacy browsers can fail on positive lookbehind.
So I had to made my day by myself :). I manged to write this:
/([^[]+(?=]))/g
Maybe it will help someone.
console.log("this is a [sample] string with [some] special words. [another one]".match(/([^[]+(?=]))/g));
if you want fillter only small alphabet letter between square bracket a-z
(\[[a-z]*\])
if you want small and caps letter a-zA-Z
(\[[a-zA-Z]*\])
if you want small caps and number letter a-zA-Z0-9
(\[[a-zA-Z0-9]*\])
if you want everything between square bracket
if you want text , number and symbols
(\[.*\])
This code will extract the content between square brackets and parentheses
(?:(?<=\().+?(?=\))|(?<=\[).+?(?=\]))
(?: non capturing group
(?<=\().+?(?=\)) positive lookbehind and lookahead to extract the text between parentheses
| or
(?<=\[).+?(?=\]) positive lookbehind and lookahead to extract the text between square brackets
In R, try:
x <- 'foo[bar]baz'
str_replace(x, ".*?\\[(.*?)\\].*", "\\1")
[1] "bar"
([[][a-z \s]+[]])
Above should work given the following explaination
characters within square brackets[] defines characte class which means pattern should match atleast one charcater mentioned within square brackets
\s specifies a space
 + means atleast one of the character mentioned previously to +.
I needed including newlines and including the brackets
\[[\s\S]+\]
If someone wants to match and select a string containing one or more dots inside square brackets like "[fu.bar]" use the following:
(?<=\[)(\w+\.\w+.*?)(?=\])
Regex Tester

Regex in R to extract words before a special character

I having a dataframe of part of speech tagged strings
Example:
best_JJS phone_NN only_RB issue_NN camera_NN sensor_NN have_VB mind_NN own_JJ
I want to remove the tags after/and the '_' so that I have the output
best phone only issue camera sensor have mind own
I am using R and I couldn't find an appropriate regex for the gsub function.
I tried this.
sentence= c("best_JJS phone_NN only_RB issue_NN camera_NN sensor_NN have_VB mind_NN own_JJ")
o1=gsub("\\_.*","",sentence, perl = T)
But This removes entire string after the first underscore. Thanks in Advance
You may use _[A-Z]+ TRE pattern with gsub:
sentence <- c("best_JJS phone_NN only_RB issue_NN camera_NN sensor_NN have_VB mind_NN own_JJ")
gsub("_[A-Z]+","",sentence)
[1] "best phone only issue camera sensor have mind own"
See the R demo
The _[A-Z]+ pattern matches an underscore (_, note it does not have to be escaped in a regex pattern) and one or more (+) uppercase ASCII letters ([A-Z]).
You may further precise the pattern, say, to only match the _ if it is preceded with a word char and match uppercase letters only when followed with a word boundary:
"\\B_[A-Z]+\\b
In case you want to create a very specific regex for the POS values, you may use alternation:
"\\B_(JJ|NN|CC|[VR]B)\\b"
And continue adding |<code> to the regex pattern.

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